Marketers love the day of love, because it’s an opportunity to drive sales and engage customers. Read tips and tricks for inspiration.

Sincerely. Valentine’s Day is a good opportunity to drive sales and engage customers. But it’s not often easy to find out what kind of promotion to run, and how to start thinking about it.

Cash in

A point is clear: it worth to run a promotion at Valentine’s Day, because men spends $158 at this occasion, and people spend not only to the significant other, but also on pets, classmates and coworkers. So small value products and services have a significant advantage!

Unsexy brands can also try to run a V-day promo, but e.g. a windows&doors retailer definitely needs to think hard when crafting the marketing tagline. “Have better windows and keep the sound of live inside the flat!” – What about his one? Sexy enough to catch attention?

8 tips, which may work for every business

• Extend the occasion, start your promotion at the beginning of February!
• Donate time to charity and talk about it.
• Make a special offer like “bring someone you love, and that person gets 50% off”.
• Give a small gift to customers.
• Offer a free rose for every purchase of $30 or more.
• Give red gift wrapping for free.
• Make a SAD deal (i.e. Single Awareness Day Deal) for single people.
• Use Facebook Ad, you can target there according to relationship status.

Segmentation strategy, statistics and ideas for unsexy brands.

The original post for this infographic is here.

Your turn: What other ideas would you add to the list? Do you have any more idea for unsexy brands? Please let us know and comment your thoughts.

About the Author: Zsuzsa Szabo is the co-founder of Antavo Promotion Builder, which helps marketers to get more customers and engage the existing ones. She tweets at @szabozsuzsa and @antavopromotion.

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Image credit: Alanna George

Valentine’s Day for Marketers [INFOGRAPHIC] is a post from: DreamGrow Social Media

From SlideShare: Make an App for That: Mobile Strategies for Retailers

Make an App for That: Mobile Strategies for Retailers is a post from: DreamGrow Social Media

Feel free to share and re-post and please link back to the source (CC license).

Facebook IPO is Coming [INFOGRAPHIC] is a post from: DreamGrow Social Media

If you find a way how to express your brand visually then go ahead and experiment with Pinterest brand pages. Here are a some examples from early adopters:

Mashable

Fiskars USA

Sony Music

Dreamgrow Social Media

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)

The Wall Street Journal

Etsy

charity: water

Gap

Whole Foods Market

Travel Channel

TODAY

Amnesty International USA

TIME Magazine

Please click next page to see more examples.

41 Great Examples of Pinterest Brand Pages is a post from: DreamGrow Social Media

Wikipedia tells us that:

Pinterest is a vision board-styled social photo sharing website and app where users can create and manage theme-based image collections. Users label and create theme-based image boards.

I have to say that I didn’t pay much attention to that site. But that changed as we got a pretty impressive peak of traffic from that site. Before January 14 we had practically zero visits from Pinterest and then it exploded.

The image that did it for us was Facebook Cheat Sheet. The image got pinned and repinned hundreds of times generating about 10 thousand visits to our site.

In some sense Pinterest is similar to StumbleUpon. However, I noticed that during the the peak in visits from Pinterest we had also a measurable growth in traffic from other social networking sites. This suggest that users on Pinterest tend to reshare the content to other social neworking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

This got me really interested and after some digging I found that Pinterest is growing like crazy. On this Experian Hitwise graph you can see how Pinterest reached 11 million visits per week in December 2011.

So what’s Pinterest?

Pinterest is an online pinboard that allows you to collect and display the images you find on the web. You can find boards from other people to discover new things and get inspiration from others. You can use Pinterest to plan their a vacation, decorate your home and share your favorite fashion items.

First of all Pinterest is really visual. If you find something that pleases the eye then you would like to pin it on Pinterest. This means that the most active categories on the site tend to be interior design, travel destinations, hobbies, fashion, food, etc.

When you open up the home page of site you will see images of resorts, shoes, pies, furniture, and so forth. And this focus also shows when you take a look at the categories list.

Experian Hitwise says that:

Pinterest visitors also over-index for the Hobbies and Crafts category (versus the online population) which is expected given the abundance of crafts content on the website. [...] This group of consumers is characterized as baby boomers and young adults who are heavy web users who spend time on house and garden, sports and fitness, and family-oriented websites.

Pinterest and social media marketing

Pinterest will work for your marketing if your business is about home décor, fashion, travel, design furniture… Everything you can eat with your eyes goes. Images that people dream about or collect to get inspired will get pinned.

For example my business partner creates wooden flooring and uses really innovative technology to do that. We talked about his site and I suggested that Pinterest might be a great match for his business. I started to show him how to use Pinterest and we found that there were already hundreds of pins with people expressing their interest in their products.

9 specific marketing tactics for Pinterest

1. Promote a lifestyle that your brand enables. Give people ideas and inspire them. This will lead to sharing your content with friends and family.

2. Run a contest where you let people pin your product images or take pictures of themselves using you brand.

3. Share great content from others that you can’t re-post to your site then use Pinterest to get it to your audience. For example we pin interesting social media marketing infographics to our pinboard.

4. Pin first, tweet later. If you find something visual that you would usually tweet about, such as infographic, then pin it to Pinterest first and then tweet about the pin.

5. Sell your products. If you add $ or £ sign to a number in your pin description than Pinterest will automatically generate a price tag on the pin.

6. Create pinnable content! When creating content think really hard about the images you use. Are they pinnable? After discovering Pinterest I have a constant desire to illustrate the social media marketing materials we create, so that they would get more traction on Pinterest.

7. Use “Pin It button”. We added this button to our own site just to test it as we don’t have much visual content but even now some of our posts get pinned. So if you have anything visual to share use it!

8. Add a “follow me on Pinterest” button to your web site.

9. Don’t pin just your own content. Create relationships by repinning images from other users and give value to your own followers by helping them discover new things.

Now go for a test drive with Pinterest. Let us know in the comments what ideas do you have about using Pinterest for marketing your brand.

Check out 41 Great Examples of Pinterest Brand Pages

What’s Pinterest and How to Use It for Marketing Your Brand? is a post from: DreamGrow Social Media

Readers
Guest bloggers
Team
Clients
Friends
Ah, well, EVERYBODY!

Every year we have made predictions about what’s going to happen over the next 12 months in social media marketing. But it’s easy to just list ideas out of thin air. So, now we are looking back to our predictions and see if we got it right or not. I’m going to assign points to the each prediction and calculate the percentage.

1. Audience will have control. Yes. People will talk about you and the only way you kan manage that is by talking back on equal terms. Respond quickly, be open, apologize.

2. Social media monitoring gets even more important (yes). You need to know what’s going on to respond and enagage in conversations or manage a crisis. Social media will not go away.

3. Engaging customers will be a challenge (yes). Social media fatique, enter a contest and win an iPad. There’s a lot of noise and people are being overwhelmed. Engaging the right people will be a focus for a long time to come.

4. Community management is important to engage people (yes). As with number 3 this is a trend that is going to be integrated into the processes of successful brands.

5. 2011 will be the year when most social media and personal communications will be in the mobile devices (moving). More than a third but less than half of the Facebook users are connecting through mobile. It’s not exactly a miss but change didn’t happen as fast as we expected. See out sociam ledia marketing trends for 2012 where we predict the same thing. In 2012 it’s going to happen.

6. One social network to rule them all. Resistance is futile (yes). There’s no serious comeptiton to Facebook as network efect works in favor of the biggest player. Google may have a chance but it will take a lot of time to even get close to Facebook.

7. Integrating websites with social technology will make them more appealing to users (yes). Washington Post Social Reader is basically on the Facebook. A lot of big site let you login with Facebook or Twitter. Sharing buttons everywhere and Facebook introducing frictionless social gestures. Yep, we got this one!

8. Social commerce (no). Not so much. We are moving in this direction but there’s no killer application yet that makes social buying really appealing to people.

9. Location! Location! Location (moving)! Location is becoming increasingly important but it is more like a feature or context not a standalone application. As location and mobile become increasingly important the use of location in marketing will continue to grow.

10. Measuring results (yes)! The more money goes into social media marketing the more important it is to show the results. Marketers are testing about models and tools. They drop ineffective options and move towards measuring real business value.

11. Social media will be integrated to overall marketing activities (moving). So, so. As we predicted for 2012, social media marketing will disappear. Well, it didn’t do that in 2011. Brands are still playing around with new tools and the seamless integration into the marketing mix has not happened yet. It will.

12. Brand is customer experience, service, product, people, stories, community (no). I really believe that this is the way to go but change happens slowly and it’ll take a few years before we see truly social brands in large scale. In this marketing, all communications, and customers will merge into seamless ecosystem. But I agree that many brands may not see how this is going to happen.

13. Marketing will hit mobiles big time (moving). 2011 is the year of the mobile explosion. You will need a mobile website and it would be wise to think about how to influence people on the go. But businesses are still figuring this out.

14. Personal messaging will move to social networks (moving). But some big organizations are already moving away from email. The importance of standalone email, IM and other services will decline.

15. Campaigns will get more dynamic, spanning from offline to actionable social channels (no). Nope! This is in the same group as marketing integration and seamless social brand experience. I would say it will be a result of these other trends. So it will some time to materialize.

16. The home page for internet users will be a social network. Yes! The biggest junk of time online goes to social networking(http://www.dreamgrow.com/comscores-2011-social-report-facebook-microblogging/).

17. Facebook will get close to 800 million users (yes). It did(https://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics)!

14 of our social media marketing predictions are really happening and 9 were spot on. Three that we missed are also happening but really slowly. So, we scored a really impressive 82% accuracy rate. Yay!

Read our sociale media marketing predictions for 2012.

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Image credit Katie Gregory

Reviewing Social Media Marketing Trends for 2011 is a post from: DreamGrow Social Media

Download the full whitepaper here.

Read the full post: ComScore’s 2011 Social Report: Facebook Leading, Microblogging Growing, World Connecting | TechCrunch.

ComScore’s 2011 Social Report: Facebook, Microblogging is a post from: DreamGrow Social Media

1. Social media marketing disappears

Social media is going to be integral part of everything we do when promoting our business. This will make social media an integral part of marketing and it will not be a separate activity. Much like SEO or email marketing, social media will be just one tool in the box.

2. Integrating social media to corporate websites

Brands start large scale integration of social media content into their digital properties. Big brands will use social media connect and user generated content to get closer to customers. This will help them get most out of true fans and brand advocates by linking their web properties to conversations.

3. More support through social media

The integration of social media will lead to people reporting their problems in their channel of choice. Social media integration lets some of those problems be handled by the peers. However, companies should find ways to avoid their social media channels becoming a glorified helpdesk.

4. Social CRM will make inroads in larger organizations

Social data will be added to the CRM systems to find trends in sentiment and indivitual preferences of customers. The goal is to engage the customer in a conversation and give value that binds them tighter to the brand. As brands lose control of online interaction social CRM will help them react and predict how conversations are taking place. Findings from IBM showed that in the next three to five years, 81% plan to focus on customer analytics and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions.

5. Social media will influence more sales

Social media integration will allow customers to get real user opinions before making purchase decisions. Social commerce is not web shop on Facebook. It’s a digital property where people can make their decision based on marketing materials from the brand and augmented with feedback from existing customers in a form of ratings, reviews and comments.

6. Social commerce on mobile devices

We will lead into a new era in eCommerce where you can directly purchase from your Facebook account. With proliferation of mobile platforms social commerce will become popular on mobile devices. Facebook’s Open Graph will also let you directly purchase with Facebook credits based on recommendations by your friends.

7. Social media budgets will grow

Most companies will increase their social media budgets. This includes in-house spending on and outsourced services. Part of the investments go to boost their own social presence through blogs and product reviews. Rest goes to external sites like Facebook. Related post.

8. Social media advertising will grow

Social media channels are looking to turn a profit so they are looking for ways to get at your advertising budget. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and others are looking into way to display more marketing messages to their users. This will increase budgets dedicated to social media advertising.

Social media advertising will grow to $5 Billion in 2012, 25% of that vill be locally targeted social advertising. Related post.

9. Social media ROI is a must

More result oriented. Still less than half of the marketers measure results from social media. Social media ROI is a hot topic but less than half of the marketers report seeing it. We see that the budgets will grow and social gets more important in the brand’s marketing mix. This means that C-level will demand results. Dollars in sales. It can be as easy as direct sales from Facebook or a bit more vague as in conversion rate of people from social channels is higher than average.

In the course of our conversations with CMOs worldwide, an overwhelming consensus emerged. The vast majority of CMOs believe there are three key areas for improvement. They must understand and deliver value to empowered customers; create lasting relationships with those customers; and measure marketing’s contribution to the business in relevant, quantifiable terms. Insights from the Global Chief Marketing Officer Study (PDF).

10. Rise of the branded content

Next to advertising there will be a push be in the user’s stream. This means brands need to create content that is good enough to be curated and shared. Content has longer shelf life, can be reused in different channels, has higher perceived value for customers. This means that content creation budgets may in many cases exceed the social advertising budgets. It wouldn’t be surprising if some brands will kill advertising in favor of content creation.

11. Content Curation and Discovery

Information explosion has created an attention deficit and people want to have a quick overview of what’s important and easily find what they need. Aggregation and content curation are going to be very important and brands start filtering information to give value to their customers.Brands will integrate curation into their IT or use third party services. News aggregation apps like Flipboard and magazine apps will find a market in corporate circles.

12. Tabletizing and mobilizing websites

Not exactly a social media thing but businesses start to make their sites mobile. Like 10 years ago companies made websites because everybody else did, now they will make their sites mobile because everybody else does. People will use more social networks’ messaging instead of regular email and IM. (Webmail providers should be worried).

13. Social gaming will grow and spill over to real world

Social Media Games have more players than prime time TV shows have viewers. In-game ads and branded game items will become important promotional tools. As social media will become more mobile so will social gaming. This means that games that are hosted on social networks, such as Zynga and EA on Facebook, will be playable on mobile devices. These kinds of games will be played on-the-go – when you’re traveling by bus, sitting in a boring lecture, waiting for your lunch. Social gaming will be integrated with real life to physically perform tasks offline that have effect in the virtual world. Engage real friends, go to locations, flash mobs, etc. The potential growth of mobile social gaming will be huge.

14. Location! Location! Location!

Location based services will be everywhere. Local information, reviews, coupons, loyalty programs and more. All tied in with your social graph. We are moving towards an era of real-time need for information. More and more people will be checking for recommendations about nearby restaurants, bars, hotels, etc. Location based services will be part of many marketing campaigns. Near-field communication chips in mobile devices get more common and will pave the way to the new era of “tap & pay” commerce. Loyalty programs will start moving towards NFC and location based solutions. NFC will be a convenient way for you to connect, share and react.

15. Most social media usage will be on mobile devices

Social media is happening in real time and people share content when it’s happening! As smartphone penetrations reaches majority and tablets become increasingly popular, sharing content will move towards mobile devices. Smartphones gives us extra depth into personalization – we can share what we want, when we want. The limits are fading! You will always be connected with social media, no matter where you are!

16. Group buying sites will add location based services

Let’s face it, it is a brain dead model. Grow a huge list by offering really cheap deals and then sell that list to businesses to get really cheap deals. Group buying will not go away but businesses will understand better what it is and use it accordingly. To spell it out: businesses buy an opportunity to let potential customers sample their offering at a hugely discounted rate in hopes of repeat business. New layer of value can be added by integrating with location based services that will alert users to deals when they are in the neighborhood.

17. Interacting with live TV in social media

Live TV shows will react to user interactions such as votes, suggestions, etc. We have the ability to change what’s happening by providing real-time feedback on social networks. TV is going to be everywhere through mobile apps.

18. News will be social

News websites will gradually be replaced by applications integrated with social media technology such as Facebook’s Open Graph. While this won’t happen instantly, we’re going down that road as we speak. People will be reading news from their dedicated applications such as iPad’s Flipboard or Washington Post Social Reader. We will take in a lot of recommendations and read the same things that our friends are reading.

19. Mobile apps will become more social

All of the successful new mobile apps will be deeply integrated with social networks allowing you to share and engage more than ever before. We will be taking in a lot of suggestions and recommendations from our friends, colleagues and other trustworthy peers.

20. Your social media footprint will grow

Frictionless sharing capabilities and social gestures will make our lives increasingly visible on social networking sites. Music, TV shows, check-ins, purchases and more will be automatically posted to social media sites. Always connected, always sharing! If you don’t share, your friends will. Some may rise privacy concerns but most people will ignore the implications and their lives are going to be more open than ever before.

21. Facebook will break the 1 Billion people mark

Where does that more than 1 billion Facebook users come from? The countries with more than 20 million people and Facebook penetration below 20% will add most of this growth in 2012. Add the potential growth of other countries and you get to a cool billion or 1.1 billion even. And that does not include China.

Here you go! What do you think will happen in 2012. Please, et us know in the comments.

21 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2012 is a post from: DreamGrow Social Media

We have compiled a list with top 15 most popular social networking sites. Together with unique monthly visitors and biggest traffic ranking sites, this list will give you a pretty good overview into the life of Social Networking sites.

Last updated: December 6, 2011

1. Facebook - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors – 700,000,000  | 3 - Compete Rank | 2 - Quantcast Rank | 2 - Alexa Rank.
2. Twitter - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors – 200,000,000  | 30 - Compete Rank | 5 - Quantcast Rank | 9 - Alexa Rank.
3. LinkedIn - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors – 100,000,000 | 57 - Compete Rank | 26 - Quantcast Rank | 17 - Alexa Rank.
4. MySpace - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors – 80,500,000 | 26 - Compete Rank | 44 - Quantcast Rank | 79 - Alexa Rank.
5. Ning - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors - 60,000,000 | 180 - Compete Rank | 120 - Quantcast Rank | 128 - Alexa Rank.
6. Google Plus+ - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors – 32,000,000 | *NA* - Compete Rank | *NA* - Quantcast Rank | *NA* - Alexa Rank.
7. Tagged - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors - 25,000,000 | 382 - Compete Rank | 151 - Quantcast Rank | 141 - Alexa Rank.
8. orkut - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors - 15,500,000 | *570* - Compete Rank | *540* - Quantcast Rank | 93 - Alexa Rank.
9. hi5 - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors - 11,500,000 | 983 - Compete Rank | 392 - Quantcast Rank | 62 - Alexa Rank.
10. myyearbook - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors - 7,450,000 | 522 - Compete Rank | 293 - Quantcast Rank | 1,036 - Alexa Rank.
11. Meetup - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors - 7,200,000 | 644 - Compete Rank | 732 - Quantcast Rank | 528 - Alexa Rank.
12. Badoo - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors - 7,100,000 | 1,346 - Compete Rank | 489 - Quantcast Rank | 125 - Alexa Rank.
13. bebo - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors - 7,000,000 | 944 - Compete Rank | 434 - Quantcast Rank | 588 - Alexa Rank.
14. MyLife - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors - 5,400,000 | 118 - Compete Rank | 688 - Quantcast Rank | 1,789 - Alexa Rank.
15. friendster - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors - 4,900,000 | 1,920 - Compete Rank | 643 - Quantcast Rank | 301 - Alexa Rank.

Statistics from: Compete | Quantcast | Alexa | eBizMBA

Top 15 Most Popular Social Networking Sites is a post from: DreamGrow Social Media

1. Convince the users

Why should users do what you want them to do? Before a user is willing to complete a call to action they have to recognise the need. Take infomercials for example. Before they ask people to respond, they first identify a problem and present a product that solves that problem.

Communicate the benefits of your call to action. What will the user get out of completing the call to action?

2. Offer something extra

Sometimes you may have to sweeten the deal to encourage users to complete a call to action.
Incentives could include discounts, entry into a competition or a free gift.

Everybody loves freebies.

3. Use active language!

A call to action should be crystal clear and tell users what you want them to do. They should include active words such as:

• Like
• Buy
• Register
• Subscribe
• Donate

All of these words encourage users to take an action. Also you may want to create a sense of urgency and a need to act now, these words can be used alongside phrases such as:

• Offer expires December 31st
• For a short time only
• Order now and receive a free gift

4. Get the positioning right

Another important factor is the position of your call to action on the page. Ideally it should be placed high on the page and in the central column so people see it right away without scrolling.

5. Use White Space

To make your call to action even more prominent, don’t just rely on positioning. Use also the space around it – White space. The more space around a call to action the more attention is drawn to it. If you clutter up your call to action with surrounding content it will be lost in the page.

6. Use alternative colors

Colour is an effective way of drawing attention to elements, especially if you use alternative colors. For example, if your website uses blues and grey, your call to action will work very well in highlighted orange. This extreme contrast leaves your users in no doubt as to the next thing they should do.

7. Size matters

Make your call to action big. We have already established that position, colour and white space are equally important.However the size does play a large part. The bigger your call to action, the more chance it will be noticed.

Look at Firefox’s call to action. Pretty big, isn’t it?

8. Have a call to action on every page

A call to action should not just be limited to the homepage or landing page. Every page of your site should have some form of call to action that leads the user on. If the user reaches a dead-end they will leave without responding to your call.

But your call to action does not need to be the same for each page. Instead you can use smaller actions that lead the user towards your ultimate goal.

9. Bring it home

So you have created an awesomely clear call to action and the user clicks on it, now what? The rest of the process needs to be as carefully thought through as the call to action itself.
So consider what happens when a user does respond to your call to action. The process should be as simple as possible. Don’t ask any information from the user that you don’t actually need.

Read this: 9 Secrets Towards an Awesome Call To Action is a post from: DreamGrow Social Media